Tag: philosophy

Helping Haiti

David Brooks contemplates why international aid doesn’t work and fails to reach a conclusion:

The first of those truths is that we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty. Over the past few decades, the world has spent trillions of dollars to generate growth in the developing world. The countries that have not received much aid, like China, have seen tremendous growth and tremendous poverty reductions. The countries that have received aid, like Haiti, have not….

The second hard truth is that micro-aid is vital but insufficient. Given the failures of macrodevelopment, aid organizations often focus on microprojects. More than 10,000 organizations perform missions of this sort in Haiti. By some estimates, Haiti has more nongovernmental organizations per capita than any other place on earth. They are doing the Lord’s work, especially these days, but even a blizzard of these efforts does not seem to add up to comprehensive change.

I see absolutely no benefit to anyone, least of all the Haitians, by turning it into the latest iteration of Band Aid. The track record of “international aid” is perfectly clear; it does not work, it fosters dependency, and it creates far more long-term problems than it solves short-term ones. The tragedy of this earthquake is, as Brooks correctly points out, the three orders of magnitude difference between it and the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. This is not an act of God, it is the entirely predictable consequences of human action. The West has abandoned the White Man’s Burden for the world along with its Christian identity. Furthermore, there are already 10,000 aid organizations present in Haiti, so one more organization or one more dollar of aid is not going to accomplish anything positive, it is merely going to prolong the very situation that turned what should have been an expensive, but minor societal annoyance into an appalling human tragedy.

Being a moderate, Brooks splits the difference by implying that those doing “the Lord’s work” should continue even though it’s not going to do any good and can even be shown to have done tremendous harm. I disagree, as I think it is wrong to act to save one life today if that action will cause one thousand deaths tomorrow. A refusal to act is not always a sin of omission; if anyone besides the people of Haiti are to blame for this lethal debacle, it is the tens of thousands of people who were so magnanimously “helping” them in the past.

It is good to help the poor and needy. But it is evil to keep people in a constant state of poverty and deprivation. Distinguishing between the two requires wisdom and discernment, not science and politics. The people of Haiti need prayer, discipline, and wise leadership, they do not need more of what has played such an important role in killing so many of them.

Letter to Common Sense Atheism VII

Dear Luke,

In your last letter, you wrote that before you could answer my questions, it was necessary to define the concept of “best explanation”. While I would have been fine with the concept of “the explanation that you find most convincing for whatever idiosyncratic reason the murky crevices of your psyche can produce to rationalize its decision”, I understand that you prefer “a model of explanation called explanationism that is intuitive to most people.”

x is the best explanation of y if it is the case that:

(A) if x were true, then by knowing x we would better understand y’s causal background than by not knowing x [i.e. x is a potential explanation of y],

and if it is also the case that

(B) x possesses the following explanatory virtues to a greater degree than any other known potential explanations of y: testability, consistency with background knowledge, past explanatory success, simplicity, ontological economy, informativeness, predictive novelty, explanatory scope, and explanatory power.

The problem with this definition by explanatory virtue is that some of the virtues cause you to artificially limit the investigation of the unknown by handcuffing it to the parameters of that which is presumed to be known. This all but guarantees systematic errors based on incorrect assumptions of the past. While it would certainly be ideal for a good explanatory hypothesis to be testable, but that is simply not possible in all cases. It therefore sets an artificial and incorrect technological limit on the process; for example, the x-ray hypothesis was correct regardless of whether it was possible to test for them.

Consistency with background knowledge is irrelevant. Fitting within a tradition of past success is similarly irrelevant. Simplicity is irrelevant too. This is philosophy, not interior design. Ontological economy begs the question of what is “necessary”; Occam’s Razor is a shortcut, not a reliable rule. On the other hand, informativeness is correct, predictive novelty is both applicable and useful, and explanatory scope and power are reasonable. I would give priority to informativeness, explanatory scope, and predictive novelty.

So, I am content to accept your explanatory model if you are willing to give priority to the three aformentioned explanatory virtues.

Best regards,
Vox

This was written in response to Letter to Vox Day VII.

Mailvox: evading Euthyphro

NR queries the Catholic response:

I regularly visit your blog and remember that you’ve discussed the Euthyphro question. I was looking at a Catholic website (www.catholic.com) that answers theological questions, and the old question came up on their website like this:

“Is the difference between good and bad whatever God says it is? Or is God good because he conforms to a standard of goodjavascript:void(0)ness?”

And the question was answered this way:

“Neither. Goodness is not imposed upon God from some external standard nor is it invented by him. Rather, it is rooted in his own eternal and unchanging nature. For example, when God commands us to love him with our whole heart and to our neighbor as ourselves, that is rooted in the fact that God himself is love (cf. 1 Jn 4:8). He could not suddenly choose to forbid loving God and neighbor, or command hating God and neighbor, for he cannot be other than what he is.”

Is this a valid answer in your opinion?

It’s potentially valid answer, but I consider it to be inaccurate as well as evasive because it confuses God’s essence with God’s will in an attempt to avoid the so-called dilemma. I believe God can choose to distinguish between His will and His essence and I suspect that He has done precisely that in the case of certain individuals who had specific roles to play at a crucial nexus. In fact, there is an inherent contradiction in the two ideas of a) a Catholic God who cannot forbid loving God, and, b) an Omniderigiste God who controls the actions of all individuals, including those who do not love Him. Of course, Catholics do not necessarily subscribe to omniderigence, so this contradiction is not necessarily intrinsic to the Catholic answer.

So, I come down strongly on the side of good and bad being whatever God says it is. We know, from the Bible, that God does change His will. But changing one’s will is not the equivalent of changing one’s essence. And I never lose any sleep over the possibility that He will change His mind about His definitions of good and bad tomorrow, since that requires a failure to distinguish between the concepts of possibility and probability.

For the record

“There is no eternal standard of right and wrong.”
– PZ Myers

I thought that was a quotation worth noting. Read the whole thing so you can appreciate the context; it is an object lesson in why biologists teaching community college students would do well to avoid attempting both logic and philosophy. Of course, the Fowl Atheist’s stated belief in the absence of any eternal standard of right and wrong and his implied belief in the absence of any objective standard of right and wrong doesn’t prevent him from constantly labeling various actions and individuals as being either right or wrong. I don’t think PZ is demonstrating hypocrisy here, however, so much as simple incoherence. One has to be aware of one’s inconsistency before one attempt to maintain a pretense, after all.

It is both hilarious and deeply ironic that someone whose ability to reason correctly is so demonstrably nonexistent should nevertheless see fit to declare: “We should build our morality on reason.” The thought is neither original nor tenable.

Fractured physics and the death of Darwin

I’ve been paying closer attention to the LHC experiment than I normally would because I’m very curious to see how stubbornly scientists will cling to theories should they be proven outmoded by the very experiments designed to support them:

ormer Harvard professor Shahriar Afshar said that failure to find the particle would bring current scientific theory tumbling down like a house of cards with nothing to replace it. The controversial physicist, whose Afshar experiment has already found a loophole in quantum theory, said that unless the scienitific community starts contemplating a “plan B”, failure could lead to “chaos and infighting”.

He said failure will undermine more than a hundred years of scientific theory and undermine some of the mainstays of sceintific thinking, the Standard Model, a general theory of how particles fit together to create matter.

I’ve also found it to be interesting how in physics – real science – there is very little, if any, of the defensive and irrational babbling often heard from true-believing TENS advocates about how a lack of an alternative theory somehow justifies the continued use of a theory already known to be intrinsically flawed. It is usually easier to show that a suggested answer is incorrect than it is to come up with a plausible alternative answer, and it should not be forgotten that through eliminating false pathways, negative results also represent scientific advancement.

As I have consistently suggested, TENS is not only a predictively useless model, but a scientifically flimsy one as well. In fact, it is looking increasingly likely that it will be abandoned by the scientific consensus during our lifetimes. Once I began studying the subject, it was immediately obvious to me that critics had been focusing on the less vulnerable parts of the theory from the start; it is the natural selection element that has even less reliable scientific evidence to support it than speciation or the concept of evolution itself.

Consider the results of some of the first methodical scientific research into the natural selection hypothesis:

The new research, carried out by Mark Pagel and colleagues at the University of Reading, in England, studied 101 groups of plant and animal species and analyzed the lengths of branches in the evolutionary trees of thousands of species within these groups. The lengths of the branches are a measure of the time elapsed between two species branching off.

The researchers then compared four models of speciation to determine which best accounted for the rate of speciation actually found. The Red Queen hypothesis, of species arising as a result of an accumulation of small changes, fitted only eight percent of the evolutionary trees. A model in which species arise from single rare events fitted eighty percent of the trees.

Dr Pagel said that the research shows speciation is the result of rare events in the environment, such as genetic mutations, a shift in climate, or a mountain range rising up. Over the long term new species are formed at a constant rate, rather than the variable rate Pagel’s team expected, but the constant rates are different for different groups of species.

The work suggests that natural selection may not be the cause of speciation, which Pagel said “really goes against the grain” for scientists who have a Darwinian view of evolution. The model that provided the best fit for the data is surprisingly incompatible with the idea that speciation is a result of many small small events,

Now, this research deals with the matter of natural selection’s time scale rather than its existence, but nevertheless underlines my point that the natural selection hypothesis has always been logic, not science. The fact that it is difficult and dangerous to paint grizzly bears pink in order to see if they breed less successfully doesn’t change the fact that no one has ever tested the widespread assumption of why polar bears are white. And while the jury is still out on both matters, the exposed cracks in the major theories naturally leads to a philosophical question: since the foundations of both modern physics and modern Darwinism appear to be wobbling, what is the basis for considering materialism to be rational given such demonstrably flawed understandings of what the material happens to be?

An atheist on indoctrination

I don’t know if the ostrich-like indoctrination approach that John Loftus describes is normal for most Bible colleges and seminaries or not, but it certainly applies to almost every university in the world with regards to economics:

When I went to Bible College I was not educated. I was indoctrinated. While other believers will protest that their Christian college was different, I wonder if that’s true. In order to test this let me explain my experience, compare it with what a good education is, and see what you think. Okay?

Yesterday I had lunch with my friend Dr. Dan Lambert of the Evangelical school John Brown University. He is using my book, WIBA, in several different teaching venues, including college/master’s level classes, and even at an adult study group for a church. I had written about this before. He’s not the only one. My friend Dr. Richard Knopp is using my book in his college/master’s level apologetics classes. I had written about this before too.

There are others, so I’m told. I would like to applaud them all for doing their very best to educate rather than indoctrinate their students. Some skeptics may claim they’re indoctrinating their students anyway, but this is the best we can expect of them. I don’t think the word “indoctrinate” can apply to doing what they’re doing, even if they are arguing against me in their classes.

I very much agree with Loftus on the difference between education and indoctrination; I am not only a strong advocate of reading the material from opposing points of view, but of learning it and knowing it better than the advocates of that point of view. For example, the average Richard Dawkins fan does not realize that when Dawkins makes the superficially straightforward statement that “evolution is a fact” he is actually committing typical Dawkinsian sleight of hand and only commits himself to having inferred the facthood of evolution. This inference, of course, is not at all the same thing as an actual fact, let alone an “inescapable” one. In like manner, few Marxians understand how thoroughly robotics and the information society have destroyed the entire foundation of not only Marxian economics, but historical materialism, simply because they do not know their Marx well enough.

I have as little patience for Christians who think it is unnecessary to know what non-Christians are saying as I do for atheists who plead that cretinous Courtier’s Reply while simultaneously attempting to criticize religion in general or Christianity in particular. The fact that one might happen to be correct about something should never be confused for the knowledge of why one is correct, the probability that one is correct, or the ability to explain why someone else is incorrect. The best minds constantly embrace challenges to their thinking, they do not run and hide from them. I can only commend the likes of Dr. Lambart who do not shirk from doing what every good teacher should do and expose their students to the arguments and ideologies they will be expected to face in the future.

Since the question will undoubtedly arise, I should point out that I haven’t read Loftus’s books, and I have no idea if his critiques of Christianity are any more serious or intellectually legitimate than those presented by the Circle Jerk of the Militant Godless.

Letter to Common Sense Atheism VI

Dear Luke,

I am sorry it took me so long to respond to your previous letter. As you know, I recently published a book and have been more than a little occupied with the various interviews that were requested as a result. And, to be honest, the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 hasn’t exactly helped my daily productivity although I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that I’ve mastered both the UMP-45 and the SCAR-H. However, I also found myself at a bit of a loss regarding the best way to respond to your most recent letter, because I was not entirely sure which aspects of your previous letters remain operable and which have been negated by the “reboot”. But, I will attempt to make some reasonable assumptions and I have no doubt you will be willing to correct me if I prove to be mistaken.

Now, you noted yourself the inherent contradiction between your original willingness to postulate that the theistic case is true and your subsequent return to a defense of metaphysical naturalism in order to assert that the theistic case is false. This is not any sort of problem in itself, since we both understood that you were merely postulating the truth of the theistic case for the sake of argument. Well and good. But, if you are “ill-prepared to defend the explanatory virtues of supernatural worldviews” you do not actually defend, as you stated in your most recent letter, this raises the question of whether you are capable of ascertaining which of the competing theistic explanations of (S) “Humans often take pleasure in the involuntary and undeserved suffering of others” is the one best supported by the observable evidence. Are you conceding the other theistic explanations now in a willingness to stand or fall on the relative merits of the case for metaphysical naturalism vis-a-vis Christianity? That is, after all, what you appear to be implying here.

One of the problems that has appeared during your continuing pursuit of clarification is that in this process, you appear to have inadvertently conceded the legitimacy of the basis for my personal belief in the truth of Christianity despite your rejection of the concept of objective evil upon which it is founded. I realize that was far from your intent, of course, and your post facto rejection of the theistic case negates it, but let me point out what has developed in order to prevent it from happening again as we consider whether Christianity, metaphysical naturalism, or some other religion best explains the existence of (S), which for me is simply one of many of the various forms of observable, objective evil.

1.You postulated that the theistic arguments succeed and the atheistic arguments fail.

2.I explained that my belief in Christianity is based primarily on observing objective evil that I find to be best predicted and explained by the Christian worldview as expressed in the Bible and mainstream Christian theology.

3.You pointed out that there are a wide variety of competing theistic explanations for evil.

4.I agreed and noted that due to my academic background in history and East Asian Studies, I have even studied a few of those competing religions. In fact, familiarity with those religions was one of the things that led me to believe the Christian explanation for the observable existence of evil was the correct one.

5.You asserted that you are not prepared to defend the explanatory virtues of the various supernatural worldviews, implying that you are not sufficiently prepared to adjudicate between them either.

6. Ergo, there is no competition for the foundation of my belief in the truth of Christianity.

This doesn’t prove that my beliefs are correct, of course, merely that you had no rational basis for questioning the legitimacy of my belief in the truth of Christianity without reopening the matter of metaphysical naturalism. Which you have now done. So, unless you would like to reopen the matter of competing theistic explanations, I shall focus on addressing only the competing explanations of Christianity and metaphysical naturalism.

The metaphysical naturalism perspective dictates that Man is merely an animal, possessed of almost exactly the same substance as any other highly evolved mammal, constituted of DNA that is more similar to the great apes than the apes are to the monkeys, let alone dogs or cats. Since we are so little different from other mammals, we cannot possess any attributes that are materially and substantively different from those possessed by them, we can only possess quantitative differences. A man may pilot a fighter jet over enemy territory while a chimpanzee only hits a rival with a stick, but both mammals are doing essentially the same thing in using a tool for the purposes of harming another. A woman may become the president of a world-reknowned university while a female gorilla may only become the dominant female in its troop, but again, both mammals are doing essentially the same thing in jockeying for primate primacy. And what blogger can be unaware of the human proclivity for flinging metaphorical feces in the electronic form of ritual primate combat?

However, I think there is a definite substantive and non-quantitative distinction between the human and the animal when it comes to (S). While the animal is capable of distinguishing between pleasure and pain, is able to experience pleasure, inflict pain, and can perceive the existence of pain in others, in my experience, I have never seen an animal derive direct personal pleasure solely from the pain of another animal. Any pain that is involved in the interaction, whether it is a dog asserting its alpha status in the local neighborhood or a cat tormenting a mouse, appears to be nothing more than a consequence of the animal’s primary purpose rather than the purpose itself. Unfortunately, humans, all too often inflict pain primarily for the sake of the pleasure it brings them. This can be observed at a very early age; young children learn the pleasure of cruelty long before they are capable of understanding how to use the infliction of emotional and physical pain as a means of protecting and enhancing their social status. This is the first hurdle that metaphysical naturalism must surmount.

The second hurdle that the naturalistic perspective must address is the divided nature of the human mind. Leaving the larger question of the nature of human consciousness aside for the mystery it remains for priests and scientists alike, it is an observable and experiential fact as well as longstanding theory that the human mind does not function in the same unified way in which we understand animal minds to operate, driven solely by instinct, experience, and desire. I am no great fan of Sigmund Freud’s or what I believe to be the profoundly unscientific pseudoscience of psychology that he created, but even I am willing to recognize that his development of the tripartite concept of the id, the ego, and the superego was driven by observational exigencies; it was his attempt to articulate and explain what he was observing in his patients.

Why do we wish to do what we are absolutely determined not to do? Why do we refuse to do what we are absolutely convinced that we must do? From where do these competing desires stem? The Christian explanation is an elegant one; even those who do not believe in it will readily admit that the explanation of the continuous competition of a man’s unregenerate fallen nature and his redeemable spiritual nature provides a rational and reasonable explanation for the rival forces that exist within a single human mind.

This leads to the third hurdle that metaphysical naturalism must eventually address, which is why (S) should be viewed any differently from any other sort of pleasure. The Disturbed song Divide asks the question in a characteristically confrontational manner:

I am a little more provocative than you might be,
It’s your shock and then your horror on which I feed
So can you tell me what exactly does freedom mean,
If I’m not free to be as twisted as I wanna be?

This is not an argument from consequence here, merely an observation that (S) is almost uninformly considered to be undesirable even by those who happen to be inclined towards it from time to time, so the strength and ubiquity of what must be logically be considered a nonsensical view from a naturalistic perspective requires explaining. Obviously the Christian worldview has little problem in explaining its declaration of (S) being unequivocally evil; contra the fevered visions of the Christian God as a deity with a torture fetish that one occasionally encounters among atheists and Christians alike, there is no evidence that God takes any particular pleasure in the destruction of the wicked except in that the necessary justice is done. Actually, the various parables of the wheat and the chaff and the sheep and the goats tend to indicate that God has no more sadistic interest in the Hellbound soul than the average human does in the trash he is taking out to await the weekly garbage pickup.

As for the latter part of your letter, I have no objection to your suggestions regarding “explanation”, “hypothesis” and “theory”, I will await your response to these three (S)-related hurdles with interest.

Best regards,
Vox

This was written in response to the 6th Letter to Vox Day

The brilliant sociopathy of Gervais

A very interesting interpretation of The Office as a structural re-envisioning of corporate culture. I have to admit that in my experience, the Gervais Principle, as the author names it, is superficially more convincing than either the Peter or Dilbert Principles.

This is where Gervais has broken new ground, primarily because as an artist, he is interested in the subjective experience of being clueless. For your everyday sociopath, it is sufficient to label someone clueless and work around them. What Gervais managed to create is a very compelling portrait of the clueless, a work of art with real business value.

Here is the ultimate explanation of Michael Scott’s (and David Brent’s) careers: they are put into a position of having to explain their own apparent, unexpected and unexamined success. It is easy to explain failure. Random success is harder. Remember, they are promoted primarily as passive pawns to either allow the sociopaths to escape the risks of their actions, or to make way for the sociopaths to move up faster. They are presented with an interesting bit of cognitive dissonance: being nominally given greater power, but in reality being safely shunted away from the pathways of power. They must choose to either construct false narratives or decline apparent opportunities.

The clueless resolve this dissonance by choosing to believe in the reality of the organization. Not everybody is capable of this level of suspension of disbelief. Both Ricky Gervais (David Brent) and Steve Carrel (Michael Scott) play the brilliantly-drawn characters perfectly. The most visible sign of their capacity for self-delusion is their complete inability to generate an original thought. They quote movie lines, lyrics and perform terrible impersonations (at one point Michael goes, “You talking to me?” a line he attributes, in a masterful display of confusion, to “Al Pacino, Raging Bull“). For much of what he needs to say, he gropes for empty business phrases, deploying them with staggering incompetence. When Michael talks, he is attempting, like a child, to copy the flawless buzzspeak spoken by sociopaths like Jan and David Wallace. He is oblivious to the fact that the sociopaths use buzzspeak as a coded language with which to simultaneously sustain the (necessary) delusions of the clueless and communicate with each other.

Of course, one would be remiss to fail to point out the way in which this postulated analytical brilliance strongly suggests Gervais’s own sociopathy. This may offer partial explanation for his atheistic hostility to religion, (not his disbelief, mind you, just the hostility), whose creators and leaders he would naturally assume to be as sociopathic as he knows himself to be.

It would appear that I may have a sociopathic trait or two myself, as the author brings up one of my favorite tactics, the last sentence aside, in extra credit for his Law Number Five: “Quoting your opponents more accurately than they can quote themselves is one of the most fascinating moves you can employ. The original speaker is put on the defensive, forced to fumble and clarify, and in the process loses control. If you want to experience true schadenfreude listen closely to what your opponents say. Do not admit to enjoying this experience.” Of course, despite the best efforts of many critics over the last eight years, this has seldom worked on me. Since I make habitual use of the tactic myself, I never cease to anticipate it. Also, there are few things more amusing than seeing an arrogant and insufficiently analytical critic snap at the bait you’ve laid before him.

Darwin’s killer disciples

The murderous children of evolution are a real problem, even if the Darwinists don’t like to admit it:

Darwin would no doubt have been horrified by all this, but it’s easy to see why some of his ideas might appeal to the disturbed adolescent mind. One conclusion implicit in evolutionary theory is that human existence has no ultimate purpose or special significance. Any psychologically well-adjusted person would regard this as regrettable, if true. But some people get a thrill from peering into the void and acknowledging that life is utterly meaningless.

Darwin also taught that morality has no essential authority, but is something that itself evolved — a set of sentiments or intuitions that developed from adaptive responses to environmental pressures tens of thousands of years ago. This does not merely explain the origin of morals, it totally explains them away. Whether an individual opts to obey a particular ethical precept, or to regard it as a redundant evolutionary carry-over, thus becomes a matter of personal choice. Cheerleaders celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday in colleges across America last February sang “Randomness is good enough for me, If there’s no design it means I’m free” — lines from a song by the band Scientific Gospel. Clearly they see evolution as something that emancipates them from the strict sexual morality insisted upon by their parents. But wackos such as Harris and Auvinen can just as readily interpret it as a licence to kill.

The truth or untruth of natural selection, or evolution by natural selection, doesn’t depend upon their consequences. But the inability of biologists to recognize the obvious logical implications of the freedom from the limits of traditional morality that they celebrate only serves to demonstrate their complete incompetence as philosophers. If it’s no longer evil to freely fornicate or worship idols, it’s no longer evil to freely rape or murder either. And a description of a theorized process of historical moral development is no rational basis for subsequent cherry-picking between those developments you happen to believe are positive and those you happen to believe are negative.

The OC on time and things

Things

I’m on a road trip this weekend, to Colorado, to finish cleaning out Emily’s apartment and deal with her things. Good gosh, she’s got a lot of things.

Had. Sorry, I’m still thinking of her in the present tense. I’m at the point now where it seems as if—oh, that she’s just on a somewhat longer than usual vacation, and any minute now she’ll walk through that door, or call my cellphone. And then I remember: no, she won’t.

Read it. And then spend some time with someone who will value it.